Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.

I have never known a greater miracle, or monster, than myself.

Truth and reason are common to everyone, and are no more his who spake them first than his who speaks them after.

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

A man must not always tell all, for that be folly; but what a man says should be what he thinks.

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it.

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of; just as we call "money" not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.

Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.

How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?

What kind of truth is it which has these mountains as its boundary and is a lie beyond them?

In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgement and virtue, little news.

Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also life itself to obtain it.

If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.

I speak the truth not so much as I would but as much as I dare and I dare a little more as I grow older.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

Why did I love her? Because it was her; because it was me.

A good marriage (if any there be) refuses the conditions of love and endeavors to present those of amity.

Let [children] be able to do all things, and love to do only the good.

As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us.

For among other things he had been counseled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom.